Incomplete Schedule Workflow on a List

I’m creating list of things and linking them together by copying a template.

Unfortunately it is buggy and not all the sub items are linked to the parent items. You can see on the screenshot that it’s pretty random (I copied the same 8 item list every time).

Any idea how to force the workflow to complete before skipping to the next list item ?

Are nested Workflow on lists intrinsically buggy ?

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Tried many tweaks with starting date and interval, removed a search… still incomplete and slow, best run got 6 out of 9 items.

Based on my testing Scheduled Workflows are not reliable

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Scheduled workflows work fine. If you are able to report and send a bug report, this will help us, the community :wink:

Help us? Do you work for Bubble @JohnMark ?

agree with @8it2
I confirm Schedule Workflow on a list is not reliable. If you’re app get too busy running many workflows, API Workflows won’t run.
And there is NO WAY to throw an error and get yourself notify, or set an auto-retry. A manual check in the Editor is the only way to check this. In Logs > Advanced search : Worflow Errors, you may see some “time out” errors

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Hi @nicolas_dap

The bubble limitation is 5 minutes timeout and the base planes are limited in capacity. You must schedule to stop and restart before the timeout (recursively). Finally, some warnings about the situation will be very much appreciated by Bubble @eve.

API workflows on a list are completely unreliable for me too these days, and even just scheduling them will often time out the app (the API workflow doesn’t even even run). There’s definitely something going on. Don’t know if this applies to everyone or just a few, but judging from other threads, several users are experiencing trouble working with lists in general.

I just filed a bug report

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no they dont, and I filed a bug report. :wink:

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TL;DR: Scheduling recursively workflows - More reliable, slower. Schedule API Workflow on List - Less reliable, quicker on short lists.

Yeah - As a long time bubbler, I’ve never learned to trust API workflows on a list. I feel the pain here!!

What I did that helped stop these incomplete lists: Once we gained the ability to loop/recursively schedule an API Workflow (inside of the Schedule API Workflow, you can schedule the same Workflow and feed it the same parameters), I’ve used that - And that has never failed me. It seems slower (not scientific)… But it appears to be guaranteed!

[New Feature] Scheduling API workflows can now be done recursively ← Great resource that goes into detail.

MY TAKE (opinion based on my experience) - May or may not be correct: I’ve put arrows on what I thought are the most important pieces - Schedule API Workflow on List appears very reliant on capacity and is sensitive to capacity spikes (plenty of forum posts on this) - So if you have a spike in capacity, it’s possible it will cause data inconsistencies. It’ll simply stop or restart itself based on capacity potentially leaving gaps in data. Through the years, from the forum posts I’ve seen, I’d wager it’s these spikes in capacity causing these data problems. (Expected response: “Well, if I look at my capacity chart, it shows plenty of capacity!” - My response: “It’s difficult to determine a spike since the capacity chart isn’t detailed enough… And I don’t trust the message saying how often my app exceeded capacity. Case and point, view the chart over past 6 hours, then do it over the past hour, you’ll see some different %'s…”)

There’s more on this topic, but it gets boring fast so I’ll leave it there :slight_smile:

Overall, try recursively scheduling API Workflows instead of Schedule API Workflow on List… It may work for you as well as it did for me - After all, data integrity is the most important thing even at the potential sacrifice of speed!

Hopefully this helps.

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Thanks for the awesome post @w.fly!

My lists are short (9 items) though :slight_smile:

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